Year: 2010

Last week VMware released vSphere 4.1, an impressive minor release for its virtual infrastructure which introduced a number of remarkable new features. One of them is called Memory Compression:

Compressed memory is a new level of the memory hierarchy, between RAM and disk. Slower than memory, but much faster than disk, compressed memory improves the performance of virtual machines when memory is under contention, because less virtual memory is swapped to disk.

See Understanding Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX 4.1 for more details.

While virtualization.info can’t say when the IT industry started researching the memory compression technique, we certainly can report about Nitin Gupta, a former member of the VMware’s Technical Staff part of the ESX Resource Management team from India, who mentioned memory compression on his personal blog in March 2009.

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Last week Symantec announced the Customer Preview for Workspace Virtualization 6.3.

Workspace Virtualization (formerly Software Virtualization Solution or SVS) is an application virtualization platform acquired from Altiris in January 2007.
Symantec didn’t publish any significant update for more than two years. Then, in August 2009, the company released the first rebranded build since the acquisition, jumping from version 2.1 to version 6.1.

In March the company released the Customer Preview of version 6.2 which introduced a new package format named XPF, containing both streaming and virtualization information so customers no longer had to convert a VSA into something that Workspace Virtualization can consume.

The new 6.3 Customer Preview instead introduces:

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Last week VMware released a massive “minor” update for its virtual infrastructure platform.
vSphere 4.1 introduces a number of remarkable new features including what is called Memory Compression:

The idea of memory compression is very straightforward: if the swapped out pages can be compressed and stored in a compression cache located in the main memory, the next access to the page only causes a page decompression which can be an order of magnitude faster than the disk access. With memory compression, only a few uncompressible pages need to be swapped out if the compression cache is not full. This means the number of future synchronous swap-in operations will be reduced. Hence, it may improve application performance significantly when the host is in heavy memory pressure. In ESX 4.1, only the swap candidate pages will be compressed. This means ESX will not proactively compress guest pages when host swapping is not necessary. In other words, memory compression does not affect workload performance when host memory is undercommitted.

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Vyatta is now offering for free its Network Virtualization course, part of their Vyatta University training catalog.

The online course teaches how to install, verify and perform basic configuration of Vyatta OVF and XVA virtual appliances for adding routing and security to VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer.

You have to register to access, but considering that Vyatta is an open source router available for free, and that the course is free too, it may be well worth the effort.

Thanks to NTPRO.nl for the news.

Microsoft is preparing a new offensive against VMware for its new fiscal year 2011, starting this October.

eChannelLine published the summary of a keynote performed by Ross Brown, the Vice President of Worldwide Partner Sales at the company.

During his speech Brown covered the five main revenue opportunities for Microsoft partners in FY11, and one of them is virtualization.
The company announced a new 20% deal registration incentive for new virtualization business starting in October.

Microsoft probably aims at reaching at least the 30% market share during the new fiscal year, counting on the upcoming Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2, currently in beta, which introduces Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V and RemoteFX for Remote Desktop Services (RDS).

Believe or not, the first blade system in the history of Cisco, the Unified Computing System (UCS), was launched more than one year ago.

Since March 2009, Cisco managed to enter a number of data centers, also thanks to the tight relationship with VMware and EMC.
In May The Register reported a sequential revenue growth last  up 168% with a unique customer base doubled to over 900 customers.
Last month Cisco reported about another 100 new customers.

HP, the player that has the most to lose if Cisco gains any significant market share, reacted in several ways.
It openly criticized the new competitor, it acquired 3Com to strengthen its networking offering, it renewed its relationship with Microsoft about virtualization.

A few are closely watching the competition and what it will produce in terms of innovation around fabric computing, virtualization and cloud computing.
One of them is Steve Kaplan, Vice President of Data Center Virtualization Practice at INX, a leading Cisco and VMware partner.

In December 2009 Kaplan presented the first public comparison between the Cisco UCS and the HP BladeSystem Matrix. As far as virtualization.info knows, nobody from HP or the HP partners network ever replied with an alternative side-by-side comparison, but HP is clearly fighting in the field.

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Oracle released yesterday version 5.0 of its Sun Ray Software, the solution introduced by Sun in 1999 to centrally control and power its Sun Ray thin clients.

This release introduces a couple of major new capabilities.

First of all, the client part, called Oracle Virtual Desktop Client (formerly Sun Desktop Access Client) can be installed on Mac OS X.
On top of that the product now ships with a connector for VMware View 4, allowing the Sun Ray Clients to be used as View thin clients.

The server component is available for Oracle Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5 Update 3, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack 2 and Sun Solaris 10 5/09 for both SPARC and x86/x64 architectures.

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The US startup Liquidware Labs just secured a very big customer: Dell Services (formerly Perot Systems).

The two companies signed a partnership to use Stratusphere and ProfileUnity in VDI assessments and migration plans for the many Dell enterprise customers.

The OEM already announced plan to use the technology for both VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop platforms, which are offered as part of what Dell calls Virtual Remote Desktop (VRD) model.

Finally, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) released the first industry standard benchmark for hardware virtualization and OS virtualization: SPECvirt_sc2010
The standard body is working on this since November 2006.

The benchmark designed to simulate the activity of three typical workloads: a web server, a Java application server and a mail server.
To do so it leverages existing SPEC benchmarks, modified to measure performance in a virtualization environment: SPECweb2005, SPECjAppServer2004 and SPECmail2008.

SPECvirt_sc2010 adopts the same approach used by the VMware benchmark VMmark, the tiles, to measure scalability: the framework deploys additional tiles until overall throughput reaches a peak and all virtual machines continue to meet required quality of service (QoS) criteria.

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Immediately after the release of VMware vSphere 4.1, Veeam announced opened a public beta program for its new Monitor 5.0.

The company released version 4.0 exactly one year ago, introducing storage, hardware and process monitoring.
The new version sports a new dashboard, over 100 pre-defined thresholds and alarms linked to a knowledge base, the capability to monitor logical disk space and snapshots, and of course the support for vSphere 4.1. This last thing means that Monitor is now able to report about completely new things like:

• NFS usage
• Storage paths and storage adapters (including load balancing status, I/O, latency, and read/write rates)
• Virtual disks: including I/O, latency, and read/write rates
• Power usage of ESX/ESXi hosts
• Memory Compression

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